3 Days of Death

It was nice sunny day. I was sailing on MT EAGLE TACOMA,my first ship. We were coming to USA from Nederland. We were at middle of the Atlantic while the nearest land was England about 900 NM away. At about 1200 hrs we received a weather forecast that we were heading towards a deadly storm which was having a wind speed upto 130 NM and waves height rising upto 10-15 metres.My captain wanted to avoid the situation and asked Engineer to provide full thrust of the engine.Suddenly at about 1500 hrs we had a black out.One of the purifier of our main engine was damaged. The engineers started the other purifier and kept the engine running because we wanted to go away from the storm.After about an hour at 1600 hrs the 2nd purifier also damaged and we had a black out.The whole ship was in deadly darkness. We could not even able to see our own hands.Meanwhile The storm hitted us straight a way.It was very scary. The main deck of the ship was like a play ground of deadly waves.Our engineers were trying out to solve the problem but unfortunately the failed.With the aid of emergency generator we were able to provide some lights for the accommodation,but we knew that with oil we had in the generator we could run it about 36 hours.We didn't know what was gonna happened after then.Because we couldn’t go out to refill the generator. In addition the back door of our Steering gear room was broken being pushed by the heavy swell.It was fully flooded,The stability of our ship also lost. We  drained out the water using the wilden pump but we had to use the reserved main engines starting air to run the wilden pump.So after this we didn’t have the air also to start the engine.After one and a half day the emergency generator stopped because of insufficient fuel. We were that time in total darkness and hopeless too. We were drifting with the storm.Some of us might thought it was our last days. We didn’t had the power to cook anything.We were taking dry food and were starving. We tried to communicate with shore but nobody could save us in that stormy weather except Allah. We had to do something special to save our life. It was about 72 hours we were in this deadly situation. After a long discussion and trials of so many things the engineers was able to start the engine.But They could only provide a speed of 5 knots per hour. We headed towards England as it was the closest land.After 6 days we could see the land and started believing that we will survive. Truely to say I myself did’t think that we were going to survive. It was my first ship and the worst experience I’ve already achieved. I’m not scared of the sea anymore but I wish nobody will go through the same situation.

(Rial,Muntasir,Jainul,Yousuf)